Journey to the Ants

A Story of Scientific Exploration

This text combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement. Accompanying Hoelldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants co-operate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they employ propaganda and surveillance and exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalance between allegiance and self-aggrandizement.